Remind me of the start of Team America

F€#k ya !

You’d think the cops would know that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_UfsqaOllc

Not arguing with you at all there Gerry, just from the way it looks at the minute they could have acted with more restraint and got a better result

Or they could have acted with restraint and got themselves killed….
I’m not defending them for what happened, but until you are standing there with someone pointing a gun at you its hard to know how you might react when your self-preservation instinct kicks in.
Not totally dissimilar to what happened an SA earlier in the week…

Or, Mattoid, the NYPD could have done their job. Their job is not to protect themselves, but to protect the public.

And what happened in South Africa during the week was murder. Police could have shot warning shots or shot to wound the miners instead they killed them. A police force is meant to be there to protect the citizens of a land not to protect big business, in this case a mining company exploiting South African workers and South Africa. I’m actually sorry for the policemen in SA. They’ve been used by by a government obviously “on the take” and sold their souls in the process.

You’re so right wing Mattoid I’m surprised your comments stay on the screen.

And John Mc – fair play to you. Thumbs up for every comment on this thread.

@Under the radar
Thanks for the casual right wing insult but unfortunately you’re totally wrong there buddy (presumably you think that those of a right wing leaning don’t deserve to have their opinions heard though – doesn’t that sound more than a little right wing in itself??). I have said in another thread that the mineworkers are being disgracefully exploited in SA, but that is a different issue.

The point is, whether you are faced with either a group of charging mineworkers about to attack you with spears, machetes and pistols (the same men who had already killed several of your colleagues and other miners), or an armed man on the streets of New York pointing his weapon at you, and you have literally a split second to react, your self-preservation instinct kicks in and you do what you have to do to protect yourself.

That is what humans are hardwired to do after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, and cops (contrary to what you might like to think) are human too. Like it or not, that is the reality here and all the training in the world cannot trump the natural instinct to survive.

Yes, the cops in NY shot inaccurately and wounded several members of the public and they will have to live with that until their dying day, but until you’re faced with a situation like that yourself, how do you know how you would react? You could remove yourself from the gene pool very quickly by hesitating.

Any talk of shooting to wound is best saved for Hollywood or for hostage situations (you may have been influenced by a youtube video where a sniper shoots the pistol from the hand of a seated hostage taker, but this is far from the norm and became so well known on youtube purely because it was so exceptional).

The Irish police hid nothing either

Super comment Rory…and the supporting link is great..

You should join up the world would be a safer place

A bit? …A lot!

Not a day by the looks of things, a year!

The cops weren’t in the line of fire, he fired three times and hit his boss with all three as far as I know, I’ll assume you were in the army at some point, I doubt you would have been let away with such poor accuracy?

He turned the gun on the police.

He fired 3 times and killed his target, turned the gun on cops, officers at the scene first said he didn’t fire on them. Hence it was a shoot down not a shoot out. 9 of 14 police bullets hit innocent people walking by. The range was around 8 or 9 feet according to one of the victims.

That’s not really how they work James. You get hit with a 9mm round at a range of 8 or 9 feet and it doesn’t matter what bit of you it hits, it is not going to bounce off you.

Maybe they were a easy with the gun fire but what did you expect them to do? Ask him nicely to stop?

Bit easy that is.

@ John you could expect them to hit the person with the gun? they had a 9:1 innocent bystander to suspect ratio, if that happened anywhere else it’d be a human rights fiasco

@ John Mc,

Standard issue 9mm rounds are not able to kill past 50m but they are still able to cause injuries. Stress and physical exercise can cause an increase in the shooters heart rate which can cause aimed shots to easily miss their target, even for professional target shooters. Add to it the lack of optics on a pistol bar a small iron sight and a crowded new york street and you have the perfect condition for incidental injuries.

Not the fault of the responding officers, they did what was needed to be done.

Cops should be tested for steroid use. Not saying its the case here but there is a growing trend in the US of people been murdered by police although i dont envy their job.

Aren’t they supposed to train for this exact situation? One guy was hit from 8 feet so I don’t see the relevance of the range affecting performance. There are records of people getting hits from greater ranges with pistols

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g1n8cmwhIY&feature=player_detailpage

Also is it not part of their job not to take shots that aren’t clear? If the shooters were people with a concealed carry permit (in another city in the states) and not cops we’d have a huge gun control row going on now. I don’t accept the doing what needed to be done argument in this case, looks more like a panic reaction by the cops than unintentional damage caused by trained professionals

lots of red thumbs… is it acceptable to kill NINE innocent people? 1 or 2 can be an accident. you cant just go into a crowd blasting people. disgraceful behavior.
only a few weeks ago a guy with a knife resisting arrest got shot dead aswell……. the gardai here would have dealt with this without guns.

Tell that to Gardai Byrne, Moriarty and McCallion, to name but a few.

@John : you could expect, given that they have to spend a certain amount of time on the range each year, that they would hit the target.

@Jason : Er, no. Just about every thing you just said is incredibly inaccurate. The lethal range of a 9mm round is usually cited (it’s an imprecise sort of thing because it depends on who it hits, where it hits them and a few thousand other variables) as being several hundred metres and its maximum range is something like 1800 metres and it could cause injuries right out to almost the full 1800. Oh, and while we’re at it? Professional target shooters DO NOT SHOOT AT HUMANS. Target shooting is a sport, it has as much to do with shooting people as Katie Taylor has to do with two drunks beating each others heads in outside a kebab shop after the pubs close.

Could have shot him in the head and be done with it, how many cops missed to have 9 others hit

You weren’t there man!!!!

need to aim first then shoot ask questions later

If someone was pointing a gun at me I wouldn’t be inclined to pause to ask him anything – I’d be too busy trying to shoot him before he shot me…

Great comment – too many armchair analysts, just as there were for Abbeylara.

Gerry, my ‘armchair experts’ comment was certainly not directed at you – in fact quite the opposite. You’re probably the best-qualified person on the whole thread to pass comment.

It was directed at commenters who were very quick to condemn those involved whilst not having a clue what it is actually like to be facing a situation like that and having to make a split second decision where the wrong decision (or indeed hesitation to make any decision) could kill you.

Hmm

Gerry when I got two red thumbs for stating a fact, shoot center mass. Do you think that was because they don’t like reality or they don’t believe me. With all your years of training how many times have you heard the sheap dog analogy?

He was probably a hard working lad like the rest of us but unfortunately was pushed to his limits and snapped just like Michael Douglas’s character in the movie ‘Falling Down’…

Ah, in fairness, I can’t argue with that, but if a he killed once, he’d do it again… that’s just my opinion.

probably would have been himself next time.

@David
I don’t think he’s quite like the rest of us – well not me anyway…

Shot center mass, to stop the threat.

No they are not. They shoot to Stop and the best way to do that is centre mass shots

Says who? A Judge a few barristers looking to make a few quid.

“Distorted and covered up”. How?

@Jason.
I’d like to know how the unfortunate Abbeylara incident was ‘distorted and covered up afterward’ as well.

Jason, I agree the Abbeylara siege was mishandled on many levels, and many opportunities were missed.

The point I’m making is that after all the prior failures, the situation was that the gardai were faced with a man armed with a shotgun advancing towards them (and civilian journalists), a man who even his family acknowledge was mentally unstable at the time, a man who had already discharged shots at gardai during the siege, and a man who had ignored orders to stop or lower his weapon.

What do you suggest the gardai should have done? Can you imagine the outcry if they failed to tackle him and he went on to shoot an unarmed civilian? You can’t have it both ways! These are the kind of nightmare scenarios that these men are called on to deal with, and I for one am glad that they’re there when required.

I presume by ‘agency responsible’ you mean An Garda Siochana and that by ‘enquiry’ you are referring to the Barr tribunal. If so, may I suggest that you check your facts again as the Gardai did in fact give evidence to the tribunal and, despite what you say Justice Barr, though finding fault with the way Gardai dealt with the whole incident, made no comments concerning any ‘cover up’ or attempted cover up. That is just absurd.

Read the report its on the net for all to see. Try and educate yourself a little before mouthing rubbish that people can very easily disprove

I’m sorry but can you please direct me to the section of the Barr Tribunal report or your source where it says that the Gardai were shown to be lying. Thanks.